Bill Kerr: Today’s labor market looks very different than it did a decade ago. Contingent and gig arrangements have expanded dramatically, and remote work is firmly established. Traditional career paths are becoming less linear with more workers moving between roles, sectors, and employment types. A growing number of intermediaries—staffing firms, talent platforms, and employer-of-record services—bridge between employers and workers navigating these shifts. How are they using the latest tools and data to match talent with opportunity, especially as an increasing share of work stands to be automated?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Jonas Prising, chairman and CEO of staffing and recruitment firm ManpowerGroup. We’ll talk about what’s driving global talent markets—from AI to sustainability—and the biggest challenges facing employers and workers. We’ll look at what’s behind the return-to-office push and how remote work might affect high-skills migration. We’ll also look at the proliferation of jobs available on contingent terms and who has bargaining power. And we’ll consider how AI is altering the skills and training picture. Jonas, welcome to the podcast.

Jonas Prising: Thank you very much. I’m delighted to join you for this discussion.

Kerr: Jonas, tell us a little bit about your career and how you got into the workforce sector.

Prising: Sure. I’d be delighted to. I started in a Swedish multinational with household appliances and then moved to commercial appliances. And that was my profession, really my professional career, for the first 10 years. And I moved to Asia and lived in the France and the U.K. during that time period. But in the late ’90s, I started to become very interested in a fast-growing market segment, which was really the business services or the services industry. And that’s when I made the change and joined ManpowerGroup in the late ’90s. And that’s been a change I’ve never regretted, because it’s really a very dynamic and interesting half-a-trillion-dollar-sized industry that’s been growing for the better part of 70 years. And what attracted me to ManpowerGroup was really both the industry, its growth prospects, but also this very close linkage to purpose and value. Our founders here in Milwaukee in 1948 were very clear that we’re going to run a great business, but we will never forget that our main purpose is to provide employment opportunities for people of various backgrounds so that they can earn a living and provide for their families and contribute to their communities.

Kerr: It’s definitely a noble purpose that resonates historically and toward the future of work as well. I’m sure many of our listeners have worked with ManpowerGroup or at least heard of it, but you’re also a quite global firm. And I was surprised to learn just how much of your activity is based in Europe and so forth. So tell us a little bit about what’s the footprint of ManpowerGroup, and what are some of the differences you feel across those markets as a global CEO?

Prising: Our system-wide revenues are about $20 billion spread out over more than 70 countries all over the world. We’re headquartered and founded here in the U.S. But very early in our history, we started moving out of the U.S. and into adjacent countries—Canada, the U.K., and then very quickly across most of Europe, early into Asia, and also very early into Latin America. Every country was different in terms of its labor market legislation, the economic implications or dynamics, and the opportunities for our industry, depending on both the verticals—the industry verticals, so the kinds of businesses we could serve—as well as the skills that were available in the market. We founded our business on access to skilled and talented labor that had been displaced when the soldiers came back from the Second World War and displaced 10 million women who had been very actively involved in the war effort on the home front. And when the soldiers came back, these women were displaced, and they were a ready and available productive talent pool for our founders to tap into and start the business. So notwithstanding our name at Manpower, of course, in its most generic description of human capital, women were really the starting point of our business here in the U.S., which then rapidly spread all over the world. But today, we have manpower that provides temporary staffing and permanent recruitment across all of our 70 countries. We have experience, which is really targeted at technology skills all over the world as well. And then we have a third leg of our business called “Talent Solutions,” and that’s essentially human capital outsourcing. So when organizations feel that they want to focus on their core activities or human capital acquisitions for strategic and operational flexibility that is not their core, that’s who they turn to. So those are the three legs of our business today.

Kerr: It’s a fascinating history. And you described in that the need to help people transition from one type of employment into something new. So even with a 70- or 80-year history at this point, you’ve been working on questions about how to reskill or upskill individuals. And that’s, of course, the centerpiece of this podcast and much of the conversation about what we need to have next. So tell us a little bit about how ManpowerGroup is working on the skills-based work, how it helps people make these transitions, and what are you hearing right now is likely the key features from employers and workers.

Prising: About 15 years ago across our countries, we started to see labor market behavior that was not really consistent with what we’d seen in the past. And that’s really the early start of when we saw megatrends impacting labor markets that were impacting them irrespective of the local economy. And the trends, of course, are trends that you are very familiar with: the demographic changes—so an aging population at the more accelerated rate, certainly across all of what was then called the “Western” world but also increasingly impacting the emerging markets; the impact of technology—the speed with the change and the global nature of that change and how it impacts labor markets in a very dynamic way; how companies then subsequently have to react to both of those trends and other trends impacting their business being very global and being impacted by global events and having to adapt to geopolitical events with a much greater sense of urgency and speed. Their time horizons have shrunk; and then finally, individuals making choices today that are very different from what were made for many generations prior. And what’s really important as part of that, is to realize that the nation or the company with access to skilled talent in their workforce wins in the market.

Kerr: I just wanted to kind of have you dwell on a little bit longer that, when you’re working with a multinational company, you’re seeing more consistent correlated demands that they’re having across all of their European, U.S., Asian operations, compared to even 20 years ago, where it was just much more of a local game that you are appealing to, and maybe even like the typical person who’s directing how they’re engaged with ManpowerGroup has moved up in the organization to a higher level employee than in times past.

Prising: No. I think that’s very true. We tend to think about our issues as very local—country-based, state-based, county-based. But, in fact, from our vantage point, many of the things that we’re seeing are very, very similar, interestingly—both in developed and in developing markets. And because some of these trends are accelerating in nature, the race in China is to get rich as a nation before it gets too old. Europe had the long advantage of increasing lifespans and improved economic conditions over a long time period, 80 to 100 years. The U.S. had the same in a slightly shorter time span. China has had to come from a very emerging-market status to a developed nation in less than half of that time, and that puts a tremendous change and strain into labor markets and what needs to happen. But these are truly global trends that are really impacting different looking labor markets in very similar ways.

Kerr: That’s fascinating. I want to continue with your idea, which I completely agree with, that access to talent is critical at both the national level—but let’s stay at the company level here. When you first sit down with the CEO of a midsize multinational organization to think through where’s your labor coming from, how’s that going to change over the next five years, what are the key things that they are grappling with that then you’re advising them on and helping them accomplish?

Prising: I’d say that these conversations have evolved over time. Ten years ago, when we saw these megatrends and demographics and the changing skill sets needed due to an accelerated technological transformation, is really well known. Very few companies were thinking about their human capital in this way. Today, these are 80 percent of our conversations. So today, most companies know that their success in the future is going to be about attracting great talent, keeping the talent that they have, and developing their skill sets into the future. And they do that by providing training programs internally, much more purposeful development of the in-house talent that they have, but also a much more strategic use of different forms of talent coming into the company for various reasons—be that from a project perspective with consultants, be that freelancers or gig workers for certain aspects of how work gets done, be that with temporary staffing, both from an operational seasonal projection or usage or strategic because changes in the business requires very significant shifts in the workforce, which are difficult to absorb in-house but are much better managed with external partners. It has become a much more strategic discussion with CEOs and senior executives, and that’s been a very marked change from where we were just 10 years ago.

Kerr: Recognizing that leaders are consistently saying this is among our very top or the very top priority, are you finding also the commensurate willingness to experiment to do things differently than what came before? Or is it more of like, we want you to wave a magic wand at ManpowerGroup and keep us basically what we’re doing, but solve this kind of talent question that’s in front of us?

Prising: Well, I think most organizations, including our own, the happy place is “carry on as you were, be successful, but don’t change too much.” So most organizations are really forced to make significant changes when the outside pressure and the realization through data that, okay, if I don’t make a move now, what got me here will not get me to my next level of success. When that realization strikes, then companies start to move, and organizations evolve and are willing to experiment. It’s always the case, I think, that incumbent organizations—so those that have been successful for a long time—find these changes much more challenging than new entrants into a market that are starting without the legacy structures, legacy processes, legacy barriers to change and are able to start on the next wave of evolution. So I think it’s a question that is hard to generalize an answer to, but it’s more company and industry specific. But what is clear is that the companies that don’t make this switch as it relates to talent, they’re going to find it difficult to attract and retain the talent that they’ll need.

Kerr: Maybe related to the importance of those megatrends, you have a widely followed Talent Barometer report, and maybe if you can share with us a few of the latest things that, as we record this in March of 2025, are top of mind right now in the workplace and issues that companies or individuals are finding really important to think about what next.

Prising: Yeah. No, we do this survey regularly. And we’ve surveyed 12,000 workers across 16 countries. And what we’re trying to understand is what motivates them to join an organization or stay with an organization. And as a starting point, of course, getting a market-based pay and benefits is a threshold requirement. Despite the importance that individuals state that the meaning has for them, it does not appear to reduce their desire for career progression or higher pay to move to a different organization. What we find, though, very clearly is the understanding from existing employees, as well as people looking to join an organization, their ability to develop their skills. No job seeker today or an employee today believes a company can promise lifetime employment, guaranteed pensions, healthcare for everyone for as long as they wish to stay. They understand dynamics change, but that also means they understand that they need to take responsibility for their own careers and their own success. So the importance of skills development for somebody joining or staying in an organization appears to be very, very high. So 87 percent of employees are confident in their skills, yet 34 percent of them in our survey say, “Look, we can see that there is a ceiling here, because I’m not getting the kind of skills that I need to be successful in my life. And so, therefore, I’m now contemplating a change.” So I think a void in skills development and lack of clarity over career paths matter today more than ever. And some of the companies we work with are actually very explicit in their employee value proposition. They say, “Look, we can’t promise you that you’ll be here for a decade or two. We hope you will, but we don’t know. But we can promise you this: When you leave, when you choose to leave, know this. You will be better equipped with better skills to position you better in your future career inside our company or somebody else’s company than you were when you joined.” And that’s an explicit promise that a lot of employees are looking for.

Kerr: And I think that’s a very important promise on the employer side. I’m curious for ManpowerGroup in this, because you’re, of course, on both sides—you’re with the firms, but you’re also with the workers. And appreciating that this is the new career path or the new ways that workers have to be responsible for themselves, are they asking different things of you, versus just maybe 25 years ago is like, “I need that job placement lead. If you can help me understand where it is, great, we’re done,” versus something that’s where “I’m back with you again, I was with you three years ago, now it’s time to move to something different. How can you help me make that transition?”

Prising: At ManpowerGroup, like any other organization, we have to be increasingly specific and intentional in what career opportunities and learning opportunities we provide our people. And sometimes horizontal moves within an organization can be extremely good for skills development. Better for pay, also. But progression cannot always imply upward mobility. It may, which is excellent, but not for everyone. So the question is, many people don’t want to move. They don’t want to change a location. They may not want to take on managerial or team leader responsibilities. They’re very good at what they are, and they’re very pleased with how they are positioned. But they want to see their skills develop. So horizontal moves are something that we’re emphasizing a lot. We’re also aided by the evolution of how we deliver value to our clients and our candidates. If you think back 30 years ago, the value we provided to our clients was having a vast network of physical branches all over the world that we knew could find the talent that those companies needed in those specific geographic locations. Well, as physical locality becomes less important, access to skills from different talent pools becomes more important. The ability to tap into that talent in-country is now augmented with the ability to tap into talent all over the world in a different way. Our value proposition has to change. And there are aspects of our work today that our people are doing, which aren’t adding that value to our clients or, for that matter, to the candidates that are looking for career-enhancing employment opportunities. So our ambition is to make our people primarily engaged in human interaction, leveraging technology for the majority of their time at work—between clients as well as between candidates and our associates and our consultants. So this is sort of the evolution. But that means that we need to change and enhance the skill sets of our people that were primarily working on administrative tasks, transactional tasks, and human-interaction tasks so that they can really thrive when they’re shifting with technology-infused tools, AI, and really enabled by technology change how they work.

Kerr: Yeah. Riffing off the touch points there, let’s go through a few themes playing out in the labor market—and I’m just going to go straight into the return-to-office mandates that we’re seeing a lot of companies in the federal government in the United States and beyond put into place. How are worker and employer expectations aligning or not aligning? When a client may ask you about, “Is this going to help the productivity of our workforce?” do you have something that you’re consistently observing?

Prising: Hybrid or remote from work today is seen by most employees as one of the greatest benefits of any organizational benefit offered when they are choosing to stay or when they’re attracted to a new organization. Now, initially during Covid, the initial phase of Covid, productivity held up well. In actual fact, sometimes, productivity even improved in the initial transition. Recently, the productivity studies that have been made show a more mixed picture. The answer goes something like this: It depends. It depends on the skills, the tasks, what needs to be accomplished. It’s better from an employer perspective to get everybody back together. So we’re living in this world of tension, because recent studies have also shown the propensity to change the organization for somebody who is working out of the office five days a week, versus somebody who’s working in the office four days a week, is much higher for the person that’s remotely based. So the instinct of employers to say, “No, no, we are a team, this is a team sport.” But I think the pendulum was very far to the left in terms of it can never be done. It swung very hard to the right for knowledge workers, it should be said, which represent about 40 percent of the workforce. And 60 percent looked at this and said, “Well, here we are, feeding the nation, caring for the ill, transporting your shopping excursions on Amazon to your doorstep, yet we don’t have any of this flexibility,” is causing tensions inside the company. And I think today the pendulum is swinging back. The median days in the office in the U.S. is about three days, but it’s moving slowly toward four. What’s also important in this discussion is to remember the younger generations want to be in the office to a greater degree than those that have spent 10 or 15 years in any particular organization. They want to engage and collaborate and be close to the company and feel that they belong to an organization, and they learn in a different and much more engaging way. So that’s sort of the state of play now. We also expect the end result being, organizations are much more flexible in terms of how they think about giving the freedom to their employees to choose how and when to work, but within a different framework.

Kerr: And building on that flexibility, does that change how they tend to work with the group like Manpower? Has it in some ways opened up new avenues that they are wanting to connect with your firm and the employee services you can offer?

Prising: Yes. I think it has definitely benefited ourselves, as well as the broader temporary staffing industry and recruitment industry. But it’s really the megatrend that has fueled the growth of what you could call technically “non-traditional” employment forms. So full-time employment, 48 hours a week. Before, a 40-hour a week used to be the norm for 80 percent of all employment. All of the growth over the last three decades has really come from part-time work, freelance, consulting engagements, temporary staffing, gig work, different forms of employment. It’s augmenting the choices that workers have in how they wish to engage with the workforce due to their personal circumstances and their personal preferences and where they are in life. There’s a time when you need a well-paying job for a predictable time period, because you have bills to pay, you have a house that you’ve purchased, you have kids that go to school. There’s other parts of life where you can augment this. And there are times when you say, “No, I’d like to change careers. I’ll do this in a different way, and I’ll try these careers in a different format than what I’m used to.”

Kerr: And certainly with the demographic pressures that you began with very early, the super megatrend of megatrends, there are many ways we’re needing to reach new workers in different ways or people that would not have traditionally participated. I’m curious, given that you see so many different markets or maybe industry segments, but is there a place you look at and say, “They’re kind of closer to where I think the gig market of the future is going to be.” Maybe it’s a certain country.

Prising: Well, I think if we take the technology industry, for instance, they are the organizations that are using the greatest number of different forms of employment than any other industry because they’re in a constant innovation cycle. Their product goes from an idea to a rapidly developing project to maturity to decline. Their cycles, their life cycles of their products and software, are short, which means there’s a time when they need a team to work on innovation. They have a team that brings it to market. Then they have a team managing maturity. And then they have a team that’s managing for cash, but really a declining phase, which means they need to have different people at a much faster cycle. And in fact, if you look at the annual reports of most of the tech companies, you’ll notice that their declared number of employees are roughly 50 percent of their total workforce, which they’re engaging with through technology, other technology partners, direct staffing in terms of our services, consultants and contractors in IT, freelance, all of that. I would say on the flip side, there are countries—and the U.S. is really leading in this way—that are highly dynamic in how we allocate skills and capabilities to industries that are growing, versus skills and industries that are on the wane, because we are a very dynamic labor market that tends to be very efficient in allocating resources quickly to where the opportunities are and where the resources are flowing into. And you can contrast that, for instance, with a continent where we’ve been very active, and we’re a big part of our businesses—like Europe, where there are many barriers to making this change of where it is most efficient and best for economic growth to deploy both financial resources and human capital at the speed of the market. And a lot of that comes from legislation, as well as wanting to protect a social contract, protecting jobs. But I think the drawback of that approach is that it’s very slow to shift to faster-growing economic engines. And we can see some of that playing out in the disparity of GDP growth between the U.S. and Europe over the last 15 years.

Kerr: The notion to go look at the tech firms and the many different employment types, I think, resonates a lot. And that’s going to lead us right into a megatrend of the other megatrend of megatrends—maybe generative AI, AI more broadly, like the technology landscape and its very rapid evolution. Give us an instance of the way you’re using this in new ways inside of ManpowerGroup. And then, also, what’s the big thing you are thinking and will happen in the external labor market as a consequence of the technology?

Prising: AI in ManpowerGroup, as well as in many other companies that we work with, is primarily being used for use cases that are focused on improving a specific task that somebody’s asked to do. In our case, it can be reviewing resumes and being able to format those resumes for our clients in a consistent way and highlight what it is that these candidates bring to the table for this particular job opportunity. So that’s one way in which we are using AI. AI today can help rank the job orders that we’re receiving—so the requests from companies of talent with specific skills against the known database of skills that we have. So making the matching process much more efficient and much faster. We can clearly see productivity improvements on a task—anywhere from 15 to 30 to 40 percent time saving. What’s important to remember, though, is our recruiters probably have 40 core tasks they accomplish during the course of a work week. So saving 30 percent of a specific task, which might be the most frequent task they do, does not translate into saving 30 percent of any particular person’s job. The break point between when you can imagine that technology replaces or displaces a person’s job is probably when 80 percent of the tasks can be automated fully. Most companies are where we are. They have specific task use cases for tasks within a job that individuals are doing. But what we haven’t seen yet is the massive and hopeful productivity improvements you would get if you look at this from an end-to-end process. So from the order to filling the position, what degree of automation can we think of there? And so I would say this: Any projection that you read about in terms of the jobs that are going to be lost or the jobs are going to be created, at this point, are completely wrong. If history is any guide, 90 percent of the impact on jobs will be to augment skill sets and make us as humans more capable, faster, and gravitate to doing the things where we feel we add more value and reduce the dangerous, transactional, or boring tasks, because technology will help us get those done. The truly transformational effect, we believe, comes when you look at this from an end-to-end perspective. But very few companies have really gotten very far in that process.

Kerr: I was going to ask exactly that question, because I think you are at the forefront of seeing what could be leading signals or what could lie around the corner with respect to these employee effects and whether a bundle of tasks has gotten sufficiently automated and so forth. The big thing is the redesign of the overall processes. And given that you advise companies to such a degree about talent strategies and where they’re going, it sounded like a few companies are starting to do that. But is it something you’re beginning to see that uptick in a way that over the next three to five years you can imagine it’s going to become a standard part of the way they’re talking about their strategic needs and how they’re interacting with ManpowerGroup?

Prising: I think that is what we should expect. But what we tend to forget is that the future of work, to a large degree, is dependent on what the workers of the future want the technology to do. And the change management associated—I talked about how our recruiters save time improving their resume writing and making it much more efficient—the question, of course, is what do they do with the additional 30 percent. I think it’s really interesting to see how companies are realizing that the issue is not the technology—because the technological evolution is actually going faster than anybody thought—but it’s the adoption and the understanding of where can we apply it that makes a difference. And lastly, where the workers want to apply it so that it benefits them as well. I’m generally an optimist in that I believe this will make our lives better, companies more productive, and workers more satisfied with the tasks that they have, because it should help them focus on the things where they can truly add value and where the other activities are really something that is being taken care of by technology in different ways through different processes of today.

Kerr: So I want to take you to another, I think, core topic that a number of companies are trying to think through, which is environmental, social, and governance—or ESG—or these types of objectives that were a few years ago maybe like the thing, and then there’s some backlash against it, and now there’s differences across jurisdictions or political parties as to how favored it is. How are they trying to navigate some of those challenges? Does it impact, ultimately, the labor that they’re seeking to hire and how they’re positioning themselves?

Prising: In most of my conversations with executives and corporate leaders, what is clear is that they remain committed to making sure that they can attract talent from diverse talent pools. Why? They understand the dynamics of the labor markets. They understand that there are cyclical issues on the labor market, but they also understand that there are megatrends impacting labor markets. And finding people will get harder. At ManpowerGroup, our starting point was believing in the need to give people an opportunity to find meaningful and sustainable employment as a core facet of our business strategy. Of course, it’s the right thing to do. It also happens to be a necessity, given our deep understanding of what the labor market dynamics are. So we are very clear and very determined to continue attracting a diverse workforce from all kinds of talent pools that in many cases are underutilized. And frankly, a lot of that is what companies pay us to do. It’s very difficult to find the talent with the right skills, which means you have to go into talent pools that you normally don’t go into. But we have experience and the ability to extract that talent with the right skill sets with untraditional backgrounds, maybe, to prior hiring practices for a client company. But for us, this is the value that we can do and channel them into opportunities that will resonate with them and provide great talent to the company.

Kerr: Yeah. Let’s continue just a little bit longer on that new-talent-pool-type question. And we’re entering in a world that the global population is going to continue to grow, I think, up until about 2080 is like when they’re anticipating peak population. But most every advanced economy is at or near its peak, and it’s going to be, in some cases, almost cataclysmic declines. So there’s going to be a lot of question about how do we get access to some of the talent that’s abroad, possibly because they might migrate to our country. But we’re also seeing some pressures, some backlash, against global migration at this point. Or perhaps we’re going to have a facility or something abroad where we can access some of the talent in a more distributed manner. And so where do you see as the forefront of that right now?

Prising: Well, I think first of all, you are absolutely right. Our population globally is 8 billion. It will peak at 10 billion. Eighty percent of that population growth, or the additional 2 billion from where we are today, will come from Africa, and 20 percent will come from Asia, primarily Southeast Asia, primarily India, which is going to be the most populous country in the world. Here in the U.S., we are actually in a reasonably good position, because we will still see population growth, thanks to immigration, for the next three or four decades. And that’s a strategic growth advantage, because growing populations means growing GDP. Now, the mobility of the workforce has been on decline for decades. And the mobility within Europe is about half of what we see here in the U.S. But also in the U.S., our desire as a population to move for work is down about 80 percent, compared to where it was 30 years ago. But generally speaking, today’s immigration flows are driven by war, famine or crisis, and significant dislocation in terms of economic opportunity. But those are the only flows. In Europe, for instance, you are starting to see the return of people from former Eastern Europe to back to their countries of origin after 20 years working in the U.K. or working in Germany, because the standard of living has now risen in places like Poland to a degree where they can make as much money there. So we don’t really see major increases in physical immigration flow. What we anticipate is a much greater flow of work to talent, as opposed to talent to work, geographically. And that is, of course, enabled by technology and access to technology. And, I think, we as nations will want to encourage that transition, because as we know, our own workforce declines in numbers and sheer numbers—meaning it makes it much more difficult to support an aging population from a cost perspective. And if you look at, for instance, the number of companies and the growth accessing IT talent in India, which is the biggest market for IT skills—we have about 6 million people with technology skills at a high level here in the U.S. India has about the same but is growing at a faster rate in terms of their educational output—the growth used to be very centered along a few big companies in India that use that tech talent to serve global companies. That growth has really stagnated very significantly. But the growth is all about what’s called “captive centers.” So organizations like ManpowerGroup establishing centers in India with the sole purpose of attracting talent that they can’t find somewhere else, but that can do work globally on behalf of that organization. And that’s where we see tremendous growth. So this trend of accessing workforce in other parts of the world enabled by technology, we think, is a long-term trend that’s going to be very important for organizations as they look ahead.

Kerr: One question, though, about that, is currently in the U.S., tariffs are seen as a big form of protectionism for the country and building up around physical goods. Would you ever imagine a similar question being done about services, digital services, and barriers to try to keep from using that talent pool abroad, but instead to stay more within the country?

Prising: So the idea that we would be able to replicate low-paid, high-skilled talent and compete in a global market long-term with tariffs, I think, has been disproven many times over. Having said that, that’s the journey that we appear to be on right now. And, therefore, although it may appear illogical and not based in data that shows where we have learned from in the past, it’s possible to imagine that the same kind of tariffs and the same kind of barriers to trade could be established for digital services and business services at large with the idea of protecting the domestic workforce from the pressures of greater talent availability, higher skill sets at different price points. But I think the Ricardo principles of comparative and competitive advantage has been proven right many, many times over. And I would assume that, over time, we will realize that we need to be able to compete maybe on different terms, but that barriers to trade in a global world is going to be a difficult equation to solve if the aim is to have our economy grow and for us to be more competitive.

Kerr: We’ve talked about a whole bunch. We’ve talked about technology and all it’s doing, its ability to take on tasks. We’ve talked about demographic challenge. We’ve talked about, so forth. Looking ahead as you think about the relative sort of bargaining power or strength of labor, versus the employer firms, and you’re sitting in the middle oftentimes kind of navigating this thing, do you anticipate there to be more leverage for the labor side going forward for that talent side because it’s so scarce and necessary, or do you think the employers are going to have either through tapping into overseas talent pools making automation more productive, or is it going to sit more with the firm, or is it anybody’s guess at this point?

Prising: My sense would be, based on where the data is coming in, is that largely, yes, the balance is shifting more toward talent with skills. And I make that distinction because most labor markets are highly polarized. Here in the U.S. right now, our unemployment rate is 4.1 percent, which is a low unemployment rate when we think about this historically. The same is true in Europe. Despite the difficult headwinds that Europe has right now, unemployment has stayed at a low level, historically speaking. And what that tells us is, of course, that companies realize they need to hold onto the workforce, because the demographic pressures are coming home to play, and they will need the skilled talent. But what’s important to understand is that the polarization of the workforce is very, very strong. So for individuals in the U.S. that have low to no education, the unemployment rate is double the average or more. And for those with skills, it’s half of the average. So it’s a highly polarized workforce. So I would say, for people with marketable skills, they are clearly going to be in the driving seat of choosing how and when and with whom they work and under what shape. However, for the unskilled or the lesser-skilled part of the population, they are going to continue to find themselves competing with lower-cost labor elsewhere in the world, which is now accessible, because we can tap into that through trade and/or services in digital goods or being squeezed through technological advances around automation. So I think the defining challenge of our time is going to be to treat this evolution of labor markets with the same sense of urgency that we need to treat climate change. The same realization has to happen when it comes to reskilling and upskilling large parts of the workforce at a scale and a dimension that we’ve never done before. So having a polarized workforce ultimately means we have a polarized population. And an unhappy, lower-paid, underemployed part of population can lead to very unexpected outcomes and an environment that’s very difficult to navigate, as we have to prepare ourselves for a future that includes everyone and gives everyone an opportunity. And especially if you think back about how this globalization benefited the world—we moved billions of people out of poverty from a global perspective, but universally, in all of the Western countries, we left people behind that were impacted by manufacturing changing due to technology in part and due to global trade in the other part, probably half and half, some of it through automation. And those were well-paying jobs in local communities, and that really devastated those communities. We can’t make that mistake twice. That’s what we need to be working very, very intently and deliberately for to address.

Kerr: That call to action, I think, is a great place for us to end on it. Jonas, thank you so much for taking us through a tour of all the things that you’re seeing in the labor market and the future of work at ManpowerGroup, and we look forward to hearing more about how you’re working with companies going forward to address it. Thank you.

Prising: Thank you.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.